Kelsey heads out to London for Pictures on Walls' holiday show- Santa's Ghetto.
Santa's Ghetto
15 Oxford Street, London UK
December 1st-23rd 2006
By Kelsey Brookes

Im pretty sure I invited myself out to London this year. No one really asked me to come out...I just kinda assumed I was invited. Logic would suggest that you should never fly half way around the world based solely on an assumption, but you also shouldn't quit a stable career as a scientist to pursue a half assed pipe dream of being able to paint for a living. Lucky for me I stuffed a sock in logic's mouth years ago hence the reason the folks at POW found me waiting on their door step with an arm load of paintings a few days before Santa's Ghetto opened this winter. For those of you who don't know....Santa's Ghetto is Pictures On Wall's annual art gallery in it's fifth year of artistic and monetary deception.

Just like last year this is the first picture I took with my camera. Unlike last year it is sunny and relatively warmer.....by relative I mean freezing to death would take about 10 minutes longer if left outside for too long. I took this on my daily commute to the Gallery. To call it a gallery really doesn't do it justice...I can't quite explain it because there is really nothing to compare it too. Its never in the same place twice, people from all over the globe come together and display their art in what is a very free and open environment, and there isn't a corner in the entire place that doesn't have something interesting happening.....It really has such a different feel to everything else I have experienced in art. It's kind of a cross between a carnival, a freak show and an art gallery...but with out all the cabbage stink.

This was the first thing I saw when I got to the gallery. This is work by Ericailcane or "Eric the Dog" from Italy. He collaborates with Blu on those massive Street pieces seen all over Italy and the rest of the world.

I was crazy happy to meet up with Washington DC based artist Mark Jenkins.....He is one busy kid traveling the world dropping tape babies where ever he goes. Such a pleasure to meet him.

This is a picture of one of Mode2's free hand figures. I just missed him putting it up but every one that saw it said he killed it. They also said he never uses any funky tips or anything but the can and the stock tip to rock all those lines .. fucking can control.

The googley eyed dork is me and that other guy is Ian Stevenson otherwise known as "I like drawing". I played fill in assistant for the day helping him finish up the Christmas Carnage scene he painted on the wall.

Things always get rushed just before the opening...but this year their was an entourage of reporters and camera men busting down the door to get in just before the crowd mobbed the place .lots has changed with these guys since last year.

Once again tiger beer......TIGER beer....it's like they know about me and my tiger thing.

The second the taped up windows were pulled down (the venue is kept secret until the show is open) there were people taking photos of the place and calling their friends. This year's Ghetto was on Oxford street....I don't know what the equivalent would be to Oxford street here in the states but Time Square might be appropriate?

This one of only 2 opening night photos I remembered to take.....give me a break, you saw all that free beer. Anyway this is my Australian buddy Morgan and his French girl under one of my paintings.

This is the other photo I took that night....beer tops....I know crap right?

Two days later (literally) I pulled myself out of bed and went back to the gallery to see if people still remembered it was there.....3-4 thousand people a day on average came to check out Santa's Ghetto.

Still taking photos of that front window...this never stopped either. I walked by this place one night at about 4 in the morning and there were still kids taking photos of the front window display.

I think this image, hung in the front window, might have had something to do with it....ya think?

This is what happens when you are POW and you open an art show on Oxford Street......you get people by the truck full..

This years parlor game was a blasphemous ring toss around the Virgin Mary's neck.....smashing!

The top painting is by d*face....who has a brilliant signature I might add...and the sculpture below it is by Joe Rush...hung upside down apparently.

This dude obviously had no idea there was a really pissed off panda with an equally pissed off hooded woman flipping him off just to his right.

This fellow's name is Tittyfreak.....yep....Titty Freak....he's from Brazil....so maybe there is some other meaning behind Tittyfreak in Portages but in English, well I'll leave it up to you to form an opinion. One thing is for sure though his art is top notch.

Guy in pin striped blazer really contemplating Faile's latest.

Everyone in the Ghetto walks around with their heads down....

This image and the below are created by Leftist tag team Peter Kennard and Kat who together created some interesting and striking images...smart cookies those two.

This is POW's new location.....much bigger than last year but they have already outgrown it.

This is my new print just finished for POW. I signed them all in one go....wasn't too bad really...only 80 in this edition.

This is the man who, single handedly, is responsible for every single print that comes out of POW....his name is Ben. Ben took it upon himself to procreate since I had seen him last. This is him teaching his young boy how to take massive hits from a gravity bong....just kidding...not really....no really just kidding.

They have so much art just lying around the office.

I needed a temporary studio for a few days to get down and sling some paint....the store room worked just fine....had to be careful just where the paint was splashed though.

Here he is.....the man, the myth, the muffin....Mr. Ben, the king shit of fumes and single hinged silk screens.

Steph out at the market looking for something that doesn't smell like paint fumes...I followed her around like the paparazzi for a few days.

This is Steve Lazarides. He is quite possibly the busiest man in the world right now. You see that cell phone .it is permanently glued to his ear....and you'll notice he is bald too...that is a side effect of the constantly used cell phone melting his scalp .he had a beautiful afro only two years ago.

This is Steve's office and some of his personal collection.

This chap (and by chap I mean one of the best painters alive) is Antony Micallef.......we ran into him signing some of his prints up in Steve's office. He lives in some beach town just south of London (with no surf) and paints some of the best shit I have ever seen .in a studio full of old landscape painters that don't understand a thing he does.

Below are a bunch of random shots I snapped while walking between Museums and Pubs.....actually that's pretty much all I did....sleep, paint, museum, pub...rinse and repeat.

We haven't been featuring many interviews as of late. Let's change that up as we check in with a few local San Francisco artists like Kevin Earl Taylor here whom we studio visited back in 2009 (PHOTOS & VIDEO). It's been awhile, Kevin...

If you like guns and boobs, head on over to the Shooting Gallery; just don't expect the work to be all cheap ploys and hot chicks. With Make Stuff by Peter Gronquist (Portland) in the main space and Morgan Slade's Snake in the Eagle's Shadow in the project space, there is plenty spectacle to be had, but if you look just beyond it, you might actually get something out of the shows.

Fifty24SF opened Street Anatomy, a new solo show by Austrian artist Nychos a week ago last Friday night. He's been steadily filling our city with murals over the last year, with one downtown on Geary St. last summer, and new ones both in the Haight and in Oakland within the last few weeks, but it was really great to see his work up close and in such detail.

Congrats on our buddies at Needles and Pens on being open and rad for 11 years now. Mission Local did this little short video featuring Breezy giving a little heads up on what Needles and Pens is all about.

Matt Wagner recently emailed over some photos from The Hellion Gallery in Tokyo, who recently put together a show with AJ Fosik (Portland) called Beast From a Foreign Land. The gallery gave twelve of Fosik's sculptures to twelve Japanese artists (including Hiro Kurata who is currently showing in our group show Salt the Skies) to paint, burn, or build upon.

Backwoods Gallery in Melbourne played host to a huge group exhibition a couple of weeks back, with "Gold Blood, Magic Weirdos" Curated by Melbourne artist Sean Morris. Gold Blood brought together 25 talented painters, illustrators and comic artists from Australia, the US, Singapore, England, France and Spain - and marked the end of the Magic Weirdos trilogy, following shows in Perth in 2012 and London in 2013.

San Francisco based Fecal Pal Jeremy Fish opened his latest solo show Hunting Trophies at LA's Mark Moore Gallery last week to massive crowds and cabin walls lined with imagery pertaining to modern conquest and obsession.

Well, John Felix Arnold III is at it again. This time, he and Carolyn LeBourgios packed an entire show into the back of a Prius and drove across the country to install it at Superchief Gallery in NYC. I met with him last week as he told me about the trip over delicious burritos at Taqueria Cancun (which is right across the street from FFDG and serves what I think is the best burrito in the city) as the self proclaimed "Only overweight artist in the game" spilled all the details.

Ever Gold opened a new solo show by NYC based Henry Gunderson a couple Saturday nights ago and it was literally packed. So packed I couldn't actually see most of the art - but a big crowd doesn't seem like a problem. I got a good laugh at what I would call the 'cock climbing wall' as it was one of the few pieces I could see over the crowd. I haven't gotten a chance to go back and check it all out again, but I'm definitely going to as the paintings that I could get a peek at were really high quality and intruiguing. You should do the same.

The paintings in the show are each influenced by a musician, ranging from Freddy Mercury, to Madonna, to A Tribe Called Quest and they are so stylistically consistent with each musician's persona that they read as a cohesive body of work with incredible variation. If you told me they were each painted by a different person, I would not hesitate to believe you and it's really great to see a solo show with so much variety. The show is fun, poppy, very well done, and absolutely worth a look and maybe even a listen.

With rising rent in SF and knowing mostly other young artists without capitol, I desired a way to live rent free, have a space to do my craft, and get to see more of the world. Inspired by the many historical artists who have longed similar longings I discovered the beauty of artist residencies. Lilo runs Adhoc Collective in Vienna which not only has a fully equipped artists creative studio, but an indoor halfpipe, and private artist quarters. It was like a modern day castle or skate cathedral. It exists in almost a utopic state, totally free to those that apply and come with a real passion for both art and skateboarding

I just wanted to share with you a piece I recently finished which took me 4 years to complete. Titled "How To Lose Yourself Completely (The September Issue)", it consists of a copy of the September 2007 issue of Vogue magazine (the issue they made the documentary about) with all faces masked with a sharpie, and everything else entirely whited out. 840 pages of fun. -Bryan Schnelle

Jeremy Fish opens Hunting Trophies tonight, Saturday April 5th, at the Los Angeles based Mark Moore Gallery. The show features new work from Fish inside the "hunting lodge" where viewers climb inside the head of the hunter and explore the history of all the animals he's killed.

Beautiful piece entitled "The Albatross and the Shipping Container", Ink on Paper, Mounted to Panel, 47" Diameter, by San Francisco based Martin Machado now on display at FFDG. Stop in Saturday (1-6pm) to view the group show "Salt the Skies" now running through April 19th. 2277 Mission St. at 19th.

For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to quit my job, move out of my house, leave everything and travel again. So on August 21, 2013 I pushed a canoe packed full of gear into the headwaters of the Mississippi River in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, along with four of my best friends. Exactly 100 days later, I arrived at a marina near the Gulf of Mexico in a sailboat.

I don't think at this point it needs to be written since the last update to Fecal Face was a long time ago, but...

I, John Trippe, have put this baby Fecal Face to bed. I'm now focusing my efforts on running ECommerce at DLX which I'm very excited about... I guess you can't take skateboarding out of a skateboarder.

It was a great 15 years, and most of that effort can still be found within the site. Click around. There's a lot of content to explore.

I'm not sure how many people are lucky enough to have The San Francisco Giants 3 World Series trophies put on display at their work for the company's employees to enjoy during their lunch break, but that's what happened the other day at Deluxe. So great.

When works of art become commodities and nothing else, when every endeavor becomes “creative” and everybody “a creative,” then art sinks back to craft and artists back to artisans—a word that, in its adjectival form, at least, is newly popular again. Artisanal pickles, artisanal poems: what’s the difference, after all? So “art” itself may disappear: art as Art, that old high thing. Which—unless, like me, you think we need a vessel for our inner life—is nothing much to mourn.

Hard-working artisan, solitary genius, credentialed professional—the image of the artist has changed radically over the centuries. What if the latest model to emerge means the end of art as we have known it? --continue reading

"[Satire] is important because it brings out the flaws we all have and throws them up on the screen of another person," said Turner. “How they react sort of shows how important that really is.” Later, he added, "Charlie took a hit for everybody." -read on

NYC --- A new graffiti abatement program put forth by the police commissioner has beat cops carrying cans of spray paint to fill in and cover graffiti artists work in an effort to clean up the city --> Many cops are thinking it's a waste of resources, but we're waiting to see someone make a project of it. Maybe instructions for the cops on where to fill-in?

The NYPD is arming its cops with cans of spray paint and giving them art-class-style lessons to tackle the scourge of urban graffiti, The Post has learned.

Shootings are on the rise across the city, but the directive from Police Headquarters is to hunt down street art and cover it with black, red and white spray paint, sources said... READ ON

We haven't been featuring many interviews as of late. Let's change that up as we check in with a few local San Francisco artists like Kevin Earl Taylor here whom we studio visited back in 2009 (PHOTOS & VIDEO). It's been awhile, Kevin...

If you like guns and boobs, head on over to the Shooting Gallery; just don't expect the work to be all cheap ploys and hot chicks. With Make Stuff by Peter Gronquist (Portland) in the main space and Morgan Slade's Snake in the Eagle's Shadow in the project space, there is plenty spectacle to be had, but if you look just beyond it, you might actually get something out of the shows.

Fifty24SF opened Street Anatomy, a new solo show by Austrian artist Nychos a week ago last Friday night. He's been steadily filling our city with murals over the last year, with one downtown on Geary St. last summer, and new ones both in the Haight and in Oakland within the last few weeks, but it was really great to see his work up close and in such detail.

Congrats on our buddies at Needles and Pens on being open and rad for 11 years now. Mission Local did this little short video featuring Breezy giving a little heads up on what Needles and Pens is all about.

Matt Wagner recently emailed over some photos from The Hellion Gallery in Tokyo, who recently put together a show with AJ Fosik (Portland) called Beast From a Foreign Land. The gallery gave twelve of Fosik's sculptures to twelve Japanese artists (including Hiro Kurata who is currently showing in our group show Salt the Skies) to paint, burn, or build upon.

Backwoods Gallery in Melbourne played host to a huge group exhibition a couple of weeks back, with "Gold Blood, Magic Weirdos" Curated by Melbourne artist Sean Morris. Gold Blood brought together 25 talented painters, illustrators and comic artists from Australia, the US, Singapore, England, France and Spain - and marked the end of the Magic Weirdos trilogy, following shows in Perth in 2012 and London in 2013.

San Francisco based Fecal Pal Jeremy Fish opened his latest solo show Hunting Trophies at LA's Mark Moore Gallery last week to massive crowds and cabin walls lined with imagery pertaining to modern conquest and obsession.

Well, John Felix Arnold III is at it again. This time, he and Carolyn LeBourgios packed an entire show into the back of a Prius and drove across the country to install it at Superchief Gallery in NYC. I met with him last week as he told me about the trip over delicious burritos at Taqueria Cancun (which is right across the street from FFDG and serves what I think is the best burrito in the city) as the self proclaimed "Only overweight artist in the game" spilled all the details.

Ever Gold opened a new solo show by NYC based Henry Gunderson a couple Saturday nights ago and it was literally packed. So packed I couldn't actually see most of the art - but a big crowd doesn't seem like a problem. I got a good laugh at what I would call the 'cock climbing wall' as it was one of the few pieces I could see over the crowd. I haven't gotten a chance to go back and check it all out again, but I'm definitely going to as the paintings that I could get a peek at were really high quality and intruiguing. You should do the same.

The paintings in the show are each influenced by a musician, ranging from Freddy Mercury, to Madonna, to A Tribe Called Quest and they are so stylistically consistent with each musician's persona that they read as a cohesive body of work with incredible variation. If you told me they were each painted by a different person, I would not hesitate to believe you and it's really great to see a solo show with so much variety. The show is fun, poppy, very well done, and absolutely worth a look and maybe even a listen.

With rising rent in SF and knowing mostly other young artists without capitol, I desired a way to live rent free, have a space to do my craft, and get to see more of the world. Inspired by the many historical artists who have longed similar longings I discovered the beauty of artist residencies. Lilo runs Adhoc Collective in Vienna which not only has a fully equipped artists creative studio, but an indoor halfpipe, and private artist quarters. It was like a modern day castle or skate cathedral. It exists in almost a utopic state, totally free to those that apply and come with a real passion for both art and skateboarding

I just wanted to share with you a piece I recently finished which took me 4 years to complete. Titled "How To Lose Yourself Completely (The September Issue)", it consists of a copy of the September 2007 issue of Vogue magazine (the issue they made the documentary about) with all faces masked with a sharpie, and everything else entirely whited out. 840 pages of fun. -Bryan Schnelle

Jeremy Fish opens Hunting Trophies tonight, Saturday April 5th, at the Los Angeles based Mark Moore Gallery. The show features new work from Fish inside the "hunting lodge" where viewers climb inside the head of the hunter and explore the history of all the animals he's killed.

Beautiful piece entitled "The Albatross and the Shipping Container", Ink on Paper, Mounted to Panel, 47" Diameter, by San Francisco based Martin Machado now on display at FFDG. Stop in Saturday (1-6pm) to view the group show "Salt the Skies" now running through April 19th. 2277 Mission St. at 19th.

For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to quit my job, move out of my house, leave everything and travel again. So on August 21, 2013 I pushed a canoe packed full of gear into the headwaters of the Mississippi River in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, along with four of my best friends. Exactly 100 days later, I arrived at a marina near the Gulf of Mexico in a sailboat.

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